Societies fail because...

I got the opportunity to listen to a lecture by the author, biologist and biogeographer Prof. Jared Diamond, on his recent book Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

An amazing lecture on societies and the how and what of their collapse. I am not going to get into detail on the whole lecture. But there were a few points that blew me away, which I would briefly mention below.

When one in the audience asked if he would recommend democracy over dictatorship as a remedy to society's ills, the author quickly said that it did not matter if it were a democratic or dictatorial leadership. As long as they were in tune with the society's changing wavelength and acted fairly quickly to their needs, it really did not matter what kind of governance was practiced. There were dictatorial leaderhips that performed quite well and there were democracies with very poor governance records too, he said.

He mentioned that great civilizations simply collapsed because the ruling elite were totally removed and shielded from the people they ruled over. So when the people suffered due to a drought, the elite would simply not understand the pain and suffering because they never got effected by such calamities. Until such as time when the people got disgusted and revolted.

So how do we find out if a society is going to fail. Is there any signs or symptoms ? Well, apparently there is. A secret american agency is working on this very same project, to predict the collapse of a society even before it actual started down that slope. If they could predict that, then one could effectively try to intervene and stop the downslide. This could help prevent the birth of destabilizing and violent forces from within these collapsing societies that could have the potential to unleash violence throughout the region and the world.

Apparently, the development indicator that gave an idea of a society's impending collapse journey was - Infant Mortality.

According to the agency, high infant mortality obviously meant that the leadership of the society did not care for the future generations of its own people. Sick and dying children forced mothers to stay home to take care of the children and that greatly reduced quantity the work force.

Moreover, an inadequate health facility would lead to low life expectancy for the general population of the society itself on the whole. So, as seen in some african societies where life expectancy is around 40, by the time an individual reaches 30 when he is part of a fully trained work-force, he has only 10 more years to contribute to the economic growth of the society. This compares very poorly with societies with life expectancy around 60 or 70 years where the individual contributes to the society for longer years.

I am sure his latest book on Collapse of societies is going to be very interesting. He is a highly recommended author by a good friend of mine and so I recommend this book to you all too.

Happy reading.